1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus, an ultrasonic image processing apparatus, and a medical image processing apparatus for supporting intuitive recognition of complicated wall motion resulting from a multi-layered structure of a myocardium by displaying a gauge divided between endomyocardial and epimyocardial layers of the heart, for example, so as to overlap on a medical image, such as an ultrasonic image, when evaluating the movement of tissue using an ultrasonic image.
2. Description of the Related Art
For body tissue, such as a myocardium, it is very important for diagnosis of the tissue to evaluate the function objectively and quantitatively. In recent years, various quantitative evaluation methods have been tried mainly for the heart as an example.
For example, as disclosed in JP-A-2003-175041, a technique called speckle tracking for calculating wall motion information on a local portion, such as displacement or strain, while tracking a local region of an image acquired by an ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus, for example, has already been put to practical use. Moreover, as disclosed in JP-A-2007-117611, and Article of Osaka City University ‘Ogawa et al. Am J Cardiol 2006; 98: 1531-1538’, a strain gauge display method of displaying a ‘strain gauge’ connecting the pair between two points for strain measurement, for example, using the speckle tracking has been proposed.
In the known methods, however, a state of movement of the line segment between two points which connects the position of the endomyocardial layer with the position of the epimyocardial layer is displayed by strain gauges on only one plane. For this reason, the heart wall motion showing three-dimensional complicated movement may not be sufficiently observed.